Sample Chapter

Chapter One

The Summer of 1911

The only drawback of an English summer is that it lasts so
short a time.
Country Life, 1 May 1911

On the first day of May 1911 temperatures throughout
England began to rise, and everyone agreed that the world
was becoming exceedingly beautiful. The cold weather of April
had held back the flowering of many of the spring bulbs, and with
the warmth of the first week of summer there had been a sudden
burst of growth. The verges of the country lanes were frothing
with cow parsley while late primroses still dotted the roadside
banks. Top-hatted men strolling in the London parks had decided
it was warm enough to abandon their scarves. Straw-bonneted
women had gathered up country bluebells to sell in wilting
bunches on street corners in the smarter parts of London, and
window boxes were already spilling over with scarlet geraniums
and marguerites. Tiny pink flowers covered the branches that
would later produce crab apples, while the ocean of white blossoms
produced by other fruit trees had prompted Country Life to
declare that 'few people can remember any parallel to its profusion.'
England was plump with promise.

The unaccustomed warmth coincided with the lifting of official
Court mourning, a relief after the constraints of the preceding
black-edged year: Edward VII had died in the spring of 1910.
A few months before his death the poet Wilfrid Blunt had
watched him take his seat in the Royal Box at Covent Garden.
The King reached for 'his opera glasses to survey the glittering
women', and Blunt saw 'a man who looked, I thought, extremely
genial and satisfied with his position in the scheme of the world.'
But on 6 May Edward fell suddenly and severely ill with bronchitis
and 'smoker's throat'. He managed, between puffs on a final
cigar, to take in the news that his horse Witch of Air had won the
4.15 p.m. at Kempton Park, and died later the same day, moments
before midnight, at the age of 68.

London went into a temporary but immediate state of gloom.
A Jermyn Street grocer filled his window with the famous black
Bradenham hams. A society hostess sewed black ribbons onto her
daughter's underwear. Crowds outside the gates of Buckingham
Palace were delirious with shock. There was a Lying-in-State at
Westminster Hall, and on 20 May Margot Asquith, the wife of the
Prime Minister, stood on a red carpet outside the door of the
medieval Hall waiting for the funeral procession of eight visiting
kings and an emperor, on its way from the Palace. At the door of
the Hall the Archbishop of Canterbury received the dead King's
widow first, followed by her son George. Soon afterwards the
King's brother the Duke of Connaught arrived with Kaiser
Wilhelm of Germany. Margot Asquith observed the Kaiser with
his 'observant eyes and immobile carriage', and could not help
thinking 'what a terrifying result a bomb thrown from Big Ben
would have had upon that assemblage.'

Society had breathed a sigh of relief when, days after Edward's
funeral, the new King and Queen announced that Royal Ascot
would not, as had been expected, be cancelled. The race meeting
of 1910 had been a surprisingly beautiful if sombre occasion.
Gazing down from the stands above the racecourse, the Countess
of Fingall thought that all the large black feathered hats made it
look at first glance as if 'an immense flight of crows had just
settled', but as she continued to watch the crowd move in monochrome
synchronicity she concluded that 'when you came close
to them, never in their lives had the beautiful women looked
more lovely.'

In certain circles, those that had formed the inner court of
Edward VII, some anxiety persisted about whether the new King
was quite up to the job. This man now ruled over the four hundred
million subjects of the British Empire. Short and red-faced, he
seemed a distant and nervous figure, and was accompanied in his
new role by an unsmiling, aloof and-let it be acknowledged only
in a whisper-less beautiful woman than his glittering mother, the
Dowager Queen, Alexandra. That day there was much hushed talk
on the racecourse and in the packed stands that had witnessed some
of Edward VII's most spectacular sporting triumphs. Conversations
about change predominated. Lillie Langtry, one of the dead King's
first mistresses, was ruined by debt; Alice Keppel, one of his most
recent mistresses, had fled to China. The grieving widowed Queen
refused to move out of Buckingham Palace to make way for her
son. For some it seemed as if a world had come to an end. People
'anticipate a good deal of change', George Cornwallis-West, stepfather
of Winston Churchill, wrote to his daughter, and some
alarmed race-goers even questioned whether the unshakeable confidence
of upper-class Edwardian England had disappeared forever.
With withering sarcasm they spoke of 'a sweeter simpler reign'.

Although the Age of Edward was over, among the privileged,
with their servants, their houses, their money and the convenient
rigidity of the class system, there was an unspoken determination
that a supremely enjoyable way of life should not alter, as the
crown shifted from one head to another. Hopeful that the
momentum generated by Edward would remain powerful
enough to ensure their untroubled existence, by May of 1911 the
aristocracy was looking forward to a glorious summer dominated
by the Coronation of George V and filled with an unprecedented
number of parties.

Mrs Hwfa (pronounced Hoofa) Williams, wife of the manager
of Sandown racecourse (Sandown had been Hwfa's brother's
estate, the racecourse Hwfa's idea), a committed socialite and an
impressively dedicated social climber, was keeping notes for a
book for which she had already chosen the title: It Was Such Fun.
Mrs Hwfa (she was always referred to by her husband's Christian
name rather than her own) seldom ran short of material. 'The
London Season was always strenuous,' she wrote, with no reason
to expect that 1911's would be any different. And though she was
well into her sixties, her sense of fun guaranteed her an invitation
to every smart party of the season. Her engagement diary confirmed
her popularity: 'Throughout the week practically every
night people were at a dinner party, or a ball or the theatre or
opera,' she wrote. 'I do not say we were busy in the daytime but
there was always something to do and combined with a succession
of late nights, the end of the week inevitably found me exhausted.'

Osbert Sitwell had a particular affection for Mrs Hwfa, observing
that 'at every dance to which she went, she was surrounded
by a crowd of young men, waiting for her arrival, and they always
addressed her as Madam.' Sitwell knew how much effort she had
to put into these parties: Mrs Hwfa was extremely deaf. 'It is not
easy', he sympathised, 'for someone afflicted with deafness to be
amusing; it calls for unceasing alertness which must be a great tax
on energy.' Sometimes, he noticed, she lost her way, and with
only the odd word to guide her did not always guess correctly
when trying to assume an expression suitable for the moment.
She would hazard 'a smile for the whimsical, a laugh for the witty,
a striking look of interest for the dealer in the dramatic, a tear for
those who wore their heart on their sleeve.' One small comfort
was the knowledge that the Dowager Queen herself, Alexandra,
suffered from a similar disability.

In line with Mrs Williams's expectations, The Times Court
Circular on 1 May 1911 overflowed with announcements for the
coming months, including balls and weddings, race meetings and
Royal investitures. Mrs Cornwallis-West was planning a spectacular
Shakespeare Costume Ball. Under the patronage of Lady
Ripon, Diaghilev was to bring his Russian dancers to Covent
Garden to make their English debut in June. Over the last few
years militant suffragettes, led by Mrs Pankhurst, had been campaigning
for the vote for women and lobbying the Government
with varying degrees of aggressive persuasion. But the Prime
Minister, Mr Asquith, had pledged to address their demands
immediately after the summer recess, so they had promised to lay
down their window-smashing bricks and hold a truce for the
Coronation summer. And members of the House of Lords were
hoping that they would defeat the Liberal Government's proposed
bill for a Parliament Act that would if passed place significant
restrictions on their voting powers.

To avoid being crushed by boredom the privileged classes who
made up one per cent of the population and owned sixty per cent
of the country would go to impressive lengths. According to Lucy
Masterman, the observant wife of a Liberal minister, the upper
class consisted of 'an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often loveable
people trying with desperate seriousness to make something
of a life spared the effort of wage earning.' Men sat about for
much of the day in their clubs; ladies spent the early part of the
morning in consultation with the cook over the dinner menu, followed
by a shopping expedition to the new 'department stores'
Selfridges and Whiteley's (which boasted a staff of 6,000) or a dress
fitting at Lady Duff Gordon's fashionable Mayfair salon which
traded under the name 'Madame Lucille'. A meeting on a Tuesday
with a friend involved in the same charitable cause and an amusing
diversion to the gallery of Sir Francis Jeune's divorce court on a
Thursday helped to while away the hours. In spare moments they
wrote anonymous letters to The Lady, a magazine which offered
them detailed advice on servant management, home decoration,
wigs, superfluous nasal hair, and flatulence control.

And yet the upper classes were still bored. Osbert Sitwell's
sister Edith, aged 23, watched her parents' friends at play and saw
them with the contempt of youth as 'semi animate persons like
an unpleasant form of vegetation or like dolls confected out of
cheap satin, with here and there buttons fastened on their faces
in imitation of eyes.' Semi-animate they might be, but most of
these dolls mustered the energy to fill the empty spaces in their
lives. Bridge was a passion, played not just at home but in the
new women's clubs, including the Army and Navy in Cork
Street and The Empress in Dover Street. Carriages came to
the house in the afternoon, the driver having earlier in the day
dropped off small white cards (stilt for gentlemen, flimsy for
ladies) at selected addresses to give advance notice of their
employer's intended visits. Since the house telephone was often
positioned in a frustratingly public hallway, a call in person was
imperative if any urgent society scandal were to be passed on discreetly.
Other people's love lives were endlessly fascinating (that
May Lady Cunard was caught in flagrante with a man not her
husband). Cinq-a-sept appointments - the late afternoon and early
evening hours allocated for sex - thrived under the complicit
though theoretically unseeing gaze of the servants. The servants'
hall, it was said, was privy to more secrets than Asquith's Cabinet.
The actress Mrs Patrick Campbell was reassuring. 'Does it really
matter what these affectionate people do in the bedroom,' she
asked, 'as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the
horses?'

The fashions of the time positively invited flirtation and dalliance.
For grander evening occasions married women displayed
erotically low-cut decolletage, and the innovative French couturier
Paul Poiret had recently brought his sheer evening gown
'La Vague' across the Channel. The dress fell straight from the
bosom to swirl seductively and wave-like round the body, allowing
a tantalising glimpse of the natural feminine curves beneath.
A new form of underwear, the brassiere, permitted the full form
of the body to be defined more clearly.

Dinner parties, eight-course affairs with handwritten menus
that might be inscribed on the shiny surface of a water-lily leaf or
on the sail of a miniature boat, were so elaborate that they became
a triumph of presentation and slick teamwork between the cook
and the butler. People still spoke of the summer when Mr Hector
Baltazzi was so overcome by winning the Derby that he instructed
his chef to float a pearl in every plate of watercress soup served at
dinner that night. At 10 p.m. carriages would arrive to carry their
bejewelled occupants to one of the great Mayfair residences - Devonshire
House, perhaps, or Londonderry House or Spencer
House - where the grand staircase leading to the ballroom would
be wound around with thick garlands of lilies, the musky-sweet
scent filling the candlelit space. Dance music was usually provided
by a band, but the rich, golden voice of Enrico Caruso had started
to resound from crimson enamel horns, the huge metal tropical
flowers of a thousand gramophones. New dances accompanied
the new music, and couples took to the floor in the turkey trot,
the bunny-hug and the chicken scramble.

No one referred to 'weekends'. The term was considered
'common' or, in the current vogue term, 'canaille'. The rich would
leave London not on a Friday but for a 'Saturday-to-Monday'. On
Saturday 'The Noah's Ark', a huge domed trunk containing
enough clothes for six changes a day, would be loaded into the car
or, for more distant destinations, a train and transported to
country houses belonging to families whose names would have
been familiar to Shakespeare. The Northumberlands welcomed
their guests to Alnwick, the Salisburys to Hatfield, and the
Warwicks to Warwick Castle. Between arrival on Saturday and
departure on Monday morning, a sequence of pleasures would
unfold. There were tennis parties and croquet matches, bicycle
rides followed by picnic lunches, their charm enhanced by white
lacy parasols and juicy strawberries and flutes of champagne
packed in wicker baskets. During long lazy afternoons in hammocks
that summer of 1911 the pampered guests looked forward
to reading aloud from the caricaturist and wit Max Beerbohm's
just-published romance Zuleika Dobson, a love story about a group
of young men fated to die as a consequence of misplaced idealism.
E. M. Forster, whose own novel Howards End had been a bestseller
only the year before, found in Beerbohm's story 'a beauty
unattainable by serious literature'. Maurice Baring, another
young novelist, described how in the afternoons the gilded youth
'moved in muslin and straw hats and yellow roses on the lawns of
gardens designed by Le Notre, delicious with ripe peaches on old
brick walls, with the smell of verbena and sweet geranium; and
stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white temples.'

At dinner the placement in the dining room upstairs would be
mirrored in the servants' hall below, the resident butler taking the
head of the table with the highest-ranking visiting lady's maid on
his right. After dinner, in the upstairs drawing rooms, small tables
lit with lamps in shades of tightly wrapped dark red silk would be
laid for bridge or the whist-drives at which Lady Diana Manners,
who was making her debut at Court that summer, excelled.
Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes would be set out in little boxes.
Maurice Baring remembered how they sometimes 'bicycled in
the warm night past ghostly cornfields by the light of a large full
moon' before retiring upstairs, where much silent and furtive
corridor-creeping between one double bedroom and another
took place. In the morning, a convenient hour before the
required appearance, fully dressed, at breakfast, a bell would be
rung and the creeping went on again, in reverse.

Some of the rich and privileged were not enjoying themselves at
the beginning of that summer. Lady Ida Sitwell could not rouse
herself to join in at all. Her life was one of total indolence, as she
tried to fill 'the blank stretch between hour and hour'. Staying in
bed all day was convenient because, as her daughter observed,
'there was nothing to do if she got up.' Edith was full of contempt
for her mother, a woman so wildly extravagant that her husband
had to limit the cash available to her. She claimed Lady Ida was
kept so short of money that she would be sent out to pawn her
mother's false teeth in exchange for a bottle of whisky that would
make the hours in bed pass a little more quickly.